Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [23]
When all the records had been played, both sides, she carried the player and records and a maroon leather album of photographs downstairs.
The photographs were from a summer long ago, and that night after the children had gone to sleep, Luce looked at them carefully, one by one. The corners of the pictures were affixed to the black pages with little scalloped black paper triangles, the glue licked by dead tongues. In the pictures, the Lodge looked nearly new. World War I wasn’t even close to happening yet. A whole different world, but occupying this same space right here. A picture of five girls in high-necked white dresses sitting on the front steps drying their long, shampooed hair in the sun. Two girls dozing together in a hammock with books spread open across their narrow waists and their tapered fingers trailing unconscious from the bindings. Girls batting shuttlecocks across a net on the lawn, skirts to their ankles and ribboned hats on their heads. Girls paddling canoes on the lake. Whiskered men in striped summer suits smoking cigars on the porch after dinner. A lovely grown woman walking across the lawn in a pale summer dress, the hem skimming the grass, her dark hair bunned off her neck and her face blurred by the motion of turning to look at the camera as the shutter clicked.
CLEAR AND MOONLESS, an hour before sunrise. The children woke and rattled around the lobby. Sliding a mica-shade lamp two inches to the left, a rust-colored piece of pottery four inches to the right. Reordering the Britannicas by some system less obvious than the alphabet. The kinds of things they did when they were hungry or bored. Luce eventually quit pretending to sleep, but she’d be damned if she was going to set the precedent of cooking before the sun came up.
She took the children out into the dark dewy yard and pointed at groups of stars. Particularly Orion, visible briefly before dawn for a few weeks during late summer like a portent of winter. When Dolores and Frank both looked at Luce’s finger instead of the sky, she moved behind them and aimed their eyes with her hands against the sides of their heads.
Just talking, figuring maybe a word now and then might register, she said, There, rising just above the ridge. Broad shoulders, narrow waist. The Hunter. He’s chasing that little patch of stars up ahead of him. The Seven Sisters. People with good eyesight can count them. Twenty-ten. Everybody else sees a few lights shining through haze. There’s a story goes with them.
Luce had gotten well into the narrative when she realized that the sisters’ suicides were coming up soon. Editing on the fly, she told it so they turned into stars without having to die first. But they were still pursued across the sky from early autumn into spring by Orion and his dangling sword. The important point was that for an awfully long time, even before people thought up the story, Orion and the sisters have gone around and around, night after night, and he still hasn’t caught them, and he never will.
NEXT AFTERNOON, the children disappeared. They had been sitting on the front porch playing the records and Luce was in the backyard feeding chickens and admiring the late-summer lushness of the woods all around. Poplar leaves already one degree off their